11 Best jQuery Image Galleries

A lot of websites which sell some kind of product or services will have images or videos to showcase how good they are at their job. How you present your awesome work to prospective clients plays an important role in determining how your revenue grows over the years.

If you have a basic knowledge of website creation, you can easily use jQuery-based gallery plugins to create amazing portfolios to woo prospective clients.

In this post, I will list some of the best jQuery image galleries that you can use to group your best work together in a unique and interesting manner.

Cube Portfolio—Responsive jQuery Grid Plugin

The first plugin in our list is Cube Portfolio. It is based on jQuery and presents your content in the form of a grid. The items can be laid out in masonry or mosaic format. You can also present them in a slider if you want to.

Here are some of its features:

responsive layout with built-in lightbox that supports images, YouTube, and Vimeo
fully customizable with over 30 different options to make it unique for your site
19 starter templates with powerful API
22 different animations for grid items and 15 different animations for captions

Cube Portfolio is an incredible plugin that will give your website a professional look. Make sure you try the different settings for captions and animation filters in the demo.

XPANDA—Responsive Gallery Content Expander Plugin

If the main focus of your gallery is images, you can't go wrong with the XPANDA responsive gallery plugin. It allows you to lay out all your images in four different basic formats and make them the center of attention.

A few interesting features of the plugin are:

responsive design
built-in image lazyloader for both thumbnails and large images
beautiful animations for expanding and collapsing items

As an added bonus, XPANDA gives you a free Photoshop action to blur and resize images with very low file sizes.

Users will be able to click on the images and read more details about them. Check out the demo to see how you can use it to create image galleries, team pages, or portfolios.

Responsive Grid Gallery—Horizontal and Vertical

If you are looking for a basic grid-based image gallery, your search ends here. People who simply want to showcase their images and don't have any extra content to go with it will like this plugin.

The images are laid out in a grid format, and you can choose a horizontal, vertical, or full-width layout.

Here are some of its features:

fully responsive image grid
hover effects to make the gallery more dynamic
ability to filter images
overlay social share icons over the images

The Responsive grid gallery is very easy to set up, so you will be up and running in no time. Try the demo and see if it's the right fit for your project.

Sharp Gallery

This plugin is a great choice if you want to display a lot of images in grid layout. You can also display some extra content that goes with each image directly within the grid.

The plugin is very lightweight at about 16KB minified size, so it will load quickly.

Some noteworthy features of this plugin are:

12 different templates to create your gallery layout
40 different settings that control everything from thumbnail width to animation
fully responsive with cross-browser support

Sharp Gallery has been designed with ease of installation in mind. It won't take you long to get started with this gallery. You should try out all 12 templates in the demo to get a better understanding of the plugin features.

Gridzy—Responsive and Justified Image Grid Gallery

Gridzy is a very easy-to-use image gallery plugin that offers all the basic features one can expect. You can set everything up and have a fully functional gallery in about ten minutes.

Here are some of its awesome features:

fully responsive with cross-browser compatibility
incredibly easy to set up
many configurable options
lazy loading improves performance

Gridzy has a five-star average rating, so you can be sure of getting a quality product. Check out the demo video to see it in action.

FullScreen Background Gallery for Image and Video

People who are looking for a more immersive experience for their image and video galleries should give this plugin a try. The images will cover the entire screen of the devices, allowing the visitors to focus entirely on the content.

Here are some of its amazing features:

support for playback of YouTube and Vimeo videos
option to lay texture over images
over 40 different settings to customize the plugin

FullScreen Background/Gallery is a fantastic plugin for people who want to give their users a distraction-free experience when scrolling through images. Take a look at the demos of images and videos with customization options.

Real3D FlipBook

This a unique plugin and is completely different from everything else in the list. You can use it as an image gallery that allows people to scroll through images as if they are flipping book pages.

Here are just a few of the many features of this plugin:

fully customizable—change everything from menu color to button shapes and sizes
pages can be interactive with links
fully responsive and optimized for mobile

Real3D FlipBook plugin tries to mimic the feel of flipping through a book as closely as possible. Flip through some sample books to see if it appeals to you.

jQuery Thumbnail Gallery With LightBox

This gallery plugin comes with an integrated lightbox to make the image a user is currently looking at stand out. There is an option to scroll through images vertically, which makes this plugin unique among the list.

The feature list includes but is not limited to:

responsive design with the ability to restrict the image width and height if needed
two layout options and two navigation options
ability to embed videos in the gallery

The jQuery Thumbnail gallery is definitely worth considering if you want to experiment with different modes of scrolling and navigation. There are 16 different demos which show grid- and line-based layouts.

jQuery MultiTransition Gallery Sliders

This plugin is simply amazing if you want to create a full-screen image gallery with catchy transitions.

You can lay out the image thumbnails in any direction you want and choose if they should be overlaid on the main page itself.

There are many other useful features in the plugin:

adding HTML captions on each slide
multiple transition effects for photos
support for HTML5 audio and video
public methods and callbacks for full control

Image galleries created using jQuery MultiTransition are actually very impressive; go take a look at the demos if you don't believe me.

ModuloBox—NextGen Lightbox JavaScript Plugin

The animations offered with this plugin are incredibly smooth and feel very natural. There is no jerky motion, and scrolling through different images is a pleasurable experience.

Here is a small list of its impressive features:

Multi-touch gesture support: it supports pinch, double tab and drag gestures making it very mobile friendly.
You can implement infinite scrolling, thumbnail navigation, and slideshow or fullscreen mode.
You are able to mix content types in your galleries.

ModuloBox uses physics-based animations to scroll through the gallery. Make sure you check all its demos to see how smooth and natural it feels.

LC Lightbox—Premium jQuery Plugin

This plugin is loaded with functionality that you would not find or expect in many other gallery plugins.

It has all the common features like thumbnail navigation, slideshow and title and descriptions for each gallery item. However, it also comes with progressive zoom and comment integration.

Here are some other features that make this plugin truly awesome:

three preset skins and four different layouts
mouse- and keyboard-based navigation
ability to mix multiple content types
dynamic element tracking

The list does not end here. LC Lightbox has a lot more to offer, which you can read about on its demo page.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we have covered the 15 best jQuery image galleries that you can integrate in your websites in a couple of minutes. Hopefully, they will cover all your needs like creating an image gallery, a portfolio, or a mixed collection of images and videos. There are a lot more plugins and scripts available in the Envato Market in case nothing in this list matches what you need.

If you still can't find an image gallery plugin of your choice, we can help you create one on your own. Just learn the basics of JavaScript from some of the different tutorials and courses offered on this website and you will be good to go. And check out some of our other tutorials on jQuery media plugins!

Which jQuery image gallery plugin do you like the best? Let us know in the comments.